by Sam Abraham
“Deshi, you are delirious,” the father said with worry. “And you look terrible. Whatever these freaks do, they cannot touch us here. Go clean yourself up. We can talk tomorrow morning, after you have eaten and slept.”
Sheepishly Han Deshi nodded. He was about to say that he was not hungry, but he was back in his father’s house, under his rules. Somehow now it made him feel lucky. “Of course, Father,” he said.
But the worry did not leave him. It took all of Han’s patience to stand in the shower as it washed months of dirt from his body. He changed into silk pajamas that his father laid out for him, and forced himself to eat a bowl of noodles. And when he climbed into his old bed, which seemed now like a child’s, small and soft, he was vexed by the words of his friend Xie until he slipped into sleep.
Chapter 54 – Gui Mei (歸妹)
Light Of Eternity
The pews of St. Theresa’s were packed as the sun rose on the day of the Lunar New Year. Rows upon rows of Jade warriors listened to a man who led them in the Lord’s Prayer. When the wooden pews echoed amen, he summoned the righteous to hear his revelation.
“You are the chosen,” Xie said from the dais. “For you alone among the sinful masses know the truth. The world has become evil again. People worship wealth over their fellow human beings. And just as God once sent the flood to crush all but one righteous family, so too He sends the waters again to drown our sins in holy baptism. That is why the Lady in the Moon was reborn, showed us miracles and brought us here. And why she has gone before us, to ready the last work she asks of the Jade.”
He paused, remembering how he had banished the false prophet. She had stolen away last night, abandoning them. Once he had asked the Lady Li to deliver an earthly haven. Once he once had dreamed of a life with her. Now he wondered how he could ever have been so naïve.
Xie stood behind the altar, looking out at hundreds of his brothers and sisters. “Let there be no question,” he said, “about the greed and apathy of this modern Sodom and Gomorrah. This city’s bankers have hoarded wealth even as they let us starve in dying lands and drown in rising seas. They live long lives, with hospitals and medicine and clean food and ventilation domes, while we break our backs farming poisoned soil and our children die in our arms. Common men are not allowed even to work in their crystal city, let alone afford homes. The rich have forgotten compassion for those less fortunate, for the meek, to whom Christ promised the earth.” Xie paused for effect, his voice deep and sure. “As the right arm of God, it is our holy duty to punish their greed, and remind any who turn a blind eye to suffering that they cannot escape divine justice. I know the Jade Prophet better than any other man, and I swear that if you follow me and purify this land of sin, you shall receive everlasting life.” He stopped, his words seeming frail to him in the ocean of time. Only acts would save them.
With his head bowed, Xie walked down the nave, between countless men and women in white. They held out their hands to touch him as he passed. Two sergeants opened the doors for him and he passed out into the courtyard. Sixty-three warriors followed him and took their positions in the square.
Xie turned to the east and bowed, prostrating himself with his face near the ground, focusing on his own smallness. He and the other sixty-three each produced a paintbrush dipped in bright white. Each drew a different combination of six lines on the pavement. All around Xie, each warrior marked the ground with a single hexagram of the I Ching, so that three hundred and eighty-four broken and unbroken lines formed an eight-by-eight grid on the gray ground.
Then as one they stood and turned inward, towards their captain. Each dropped to his knees, writing a single character between the hexagrams. Every letter was for a righteous brother or sister who had given the ultimate sacrifice, after the birth of the Holy Lake, or in the liberation of Tongling, or the battle for the City of Heaven on Earth, or the pilgrimage of reunification. The characters told the story of Noah, of how once again man forgot the nature of evil, forcing God to break His promise.
Xie stood back to examine their work. Fire and rain and earth and Heaven and mountain and lake and man and woman and all the antipodes split by small minds found symmetry in thin lines of paint. He closed his good eye, which he found himself doing more often these days, and with his implant saw the amber glow of hundreds of souls around him. Then unwelcome thoughts of Jia Anmei intruded on his meditation, and Li in her bloody dress, and the fading curves of his dead wife, and he wondered how blissful peace would be when it came.
***
That afternoon, a parade cascaded down Beijing West Road to celebrate the Lunar New Year. The festivities were rich, as it was auspicious for the Mayor to pay homage to his sigil.
The parade set out from the curling pagodas of Jing’an Temple, the seat of the Silver Buddha. Three hundred men in orange uniforms marched down the street, waving red flags brighter than the thin sun struggling through the smog. They were followed by a stream of silken dragons with fearsome paper teeth, curling in the breeze and bringing luck to the island. Behind them came three hundred young women in blue cheongsam, holding cerulean parasols. Then came three floats, lolling gardens upon which heroes stood with fluttering kites, and then a trio of fishing junks, raising their sails as they rolled down the wide streets of Puxi’s commercial district.
Finally, the floats made way for the guest of honor, a giant paper tiger. Fifty meters tall, it pretended to roar at the sprawling metropolis. Sixteen men and robot-guided frames wheeled the great striped cat down the street. Thirty boys stood under the idol’s broad haunches, behind golden braids masquerading as tiger fur, banging gongs in time. The whole orange production was almost too wide to squeeze between the city of crystal that rose around elevated roads.
People lined the boulevards under the Huangpu District dome in jostling revelry, with packs of street vendors selling skewered meat and sugared confections and traditional music. At least one boy from every notable family in Shanghai was there, lest anyone risk inadvertently snubbing the Mayor. Rumors that drones registered who watched did not hurt attendance either. The great tiger rolled past the old Government building near People’s Park towards the twisting Huangpu River, past the old colonial and Communist buildings, past more than a million people hungry for distraction.
Li Aizhu pushed through the crowd, oblivious to the celebration, her face covered in a white scarf as she made her way to the Huangpu River. She had slept on the street the night before in a sunken alley, finding solace in a stolen bottle of whiskey. When she woke late, she found the district clogged. Now she could only shuffle through inch by inch as the streets jammed and the parade approached People’s Park.
Near People’s Park was St. Theresa’s. And inside the church were the Jade.
“Watch for the door to Heaven!” Xie yelled in the courtyard, holding out his hands. “For whosoever will lose his life for Lady Li’s sake shall find it at God’s holy table.”
So it was that Xie, Jade Captain and consort to the Lady in the Moon, led hundreds out of the church towards the park. Thousands joined them, spilling from alleys where they had been gathering for days. And from other occuhives and hiding places came still more, converts from sects who had gravitated to the Jade, the Martyrs and the Green Earth sect and the Word of Angels. Some held green banners with broken and unbroken lines whipping in the wind. Others held sticks of wood soaked in gasoline. Most held nothing except their unshaken belief that the path to Heaven would be found when the rich were stripped of sin.
Soon a sea of white Jade flooded the parade route. They filled the street, overrunning the men in red tassels and women in blue dresses, making Jing’an District a frothing mix of color.
Torches were lit. And the Jade pilgrims holding them set fire to the floats.
The giant ships went up quickly, holes flaring in their canvas sails. A group of men in white wheeled one of the ships backwards, crashing it into the tiger, and the flames ballooned. Those who had pushed and shoved to get closer to
the street now broke in every direction, running from the madness. Sirens blared as lines of police cars surrounded the parade route. Cops attacked men holding torches and forced them to the pavement, arresting anyone in white.
Li Aizhu, trapped in the crowd, watched in horror as men and women who had once prayed to her now ran amok, beating innocent people with fists and bricks. She fought back tears as everything she had once believed in, her great search for personal salvation, had been usurped into wanton bloodlust. But as great as this betrayal was, as much as it made her want to crawl into a dark hole and cry, she knew that she had to stay focused. Pernicious cancer would eat her alive and cut down her daughter if she could not reach her maker, hiding in the dark tower beyond the river.
Crushed by the mob, desperate to escape, Li brought forth rings of electricity around her body, a forcefield of current that repelled the Jade and their victims alike, carving the riot from her path.
But Li’s electromagnetic halo drew attention. Cops surrounded her, holos in their visors targeting her as the renegade cult leader. They pulled pulsers and prepared to take her out.
She fell into a roll and caught one at the kneecaps, flinging him into his fellows. Dodging shots, she jumped, vaulting over the line of cops, and sprinted into traffic. A sedan smashed into her and caved as if it had wrapped around a lamp post. Horns blared as the whole road slammed on the brakes. Walking to a bus, she grabbed the front fender and closed her eyes. Hating herself for what she was about to do, her fingers bit metal and she lifted the huge vehicle above her head, hurling it fifty feet into the lines of police.
Suddenly an explosion rocked the district. The ground trembled as Yan’an Road collapsed where it met the North-South Elevated Road, southwest of People’s Park. In shock, Li watched smoke crawl above the towers. It billowed into the sky, hiding the mantiscraft overhead.
Captain Xie watched Li from afar through a holoscope, sneering as he saw her electric sphere. The Jade would not know that she had abandoned them, he thought, even as they did not know of the lamb that he had ordered to detonate a vest of plastique. They would only see the retribution they were bringing upon their oppressors. “To the water!” he cried, sprinting towards the Huangpu. Hundreds of Jade ran after him, overturning barricades on Beijing West Road as broken highways clogged with sirens.
The Jade followed Captain Xie blindly, burning anything they could, smashing the glass storefronts of coffee shops and hydrocycle dealers and holobead outlets and fashion boutiques. The opulence of Waitan became smeared with ash and blood as the wrath of the Jade lashed out indiscriminately. Bureaucrats were trussed up in rope and led screaming into burning pyres. Women wearing gilded crosses were beaten for their greed. The elderly were trampled by the dirty feet of pilgrims delivering vengeance in search of salvation. And the streets were so choked with people and cars and burning rubble that the forces of order were impotent to squelch the violent flames.
Mediadrones swarmed, watching the Jade ransack glitzy plazas, barging into malls and setting fire to children’s toys and women’s shoes and holodiscs and all the brands that Xie had taught them to see as sin. Red lanterns hanging in honor of the Spring Festival caught the blaze easily, and the air grew thick with ash. And then the Jade were on the Bund, spilling up the esplanade. Snipers unloaded their clips and men in white died by the hundreds, staining the bank red.
Li ran desperately, shoving Jade from her path, arcs of electricity crackling from her skin. Suddenly, sirens blared as cop cars formed a barrier between her and the Huangpu, across Henan Middle Road. Police took cover with pulsers, firing as Li burst from the smoke and the mob, cutting down lines of Jade and littering the ground with bodies.
But any shells flying within a meter of Li were melted in midair by the electrokinetic shield surrounding her. She sprinted towards the barricade, leaping between cruisers. Bolts shot from her, shattering windshields and frying flak jackets and blackening asphalt.
As Li ran, desperate to reach the water, she saw a speedboat fly up the river. There was barely enough room for the pilot and another man, surrounded as they were by plastic cases jutting against the hull. Her heart sank when she saw the other man’s cybernetic eye, and knew it was Xie.
Melting into a rage, she leapt off the boardwalk, cut the charge around her as she hit the water, and swam after the boat through the polluted Huangpu. The stench assaulted her, and the garbage in the river soiled her skin as she watched the speedboat zoom out towards Pudong. For a moment she saw Xie look back at her, before the whine of bullets forced her to dive down out of sight.
Xie saw her disappear under the water, and became lost in the reverie of carnage he had brought upon the moneylenders. Turning forward, he watched a barge float downriver, right on schedule. Xie had learned from the Martyrs that it would be transporting bundles of refuse, as harmless as turnips in the ground.
As the speedboat pulled alongside the barge, Xie pulled on microbarb gloves – the same ones, he mused for a small moment, that Li had used to climb the bridge in Anqing so many months ago. Then he strapped a can of gas to his back and hauled himself up the rough hull. After placing the gas can on deck, he ran up to the bridge and stormed the cockpit, firing on the crew and killing them in cold blood. When he had jammed the throttle in place, he ran back down, poured the gas on heaps of garbage, and set it ablaze.
As the fire roared, hiding him from watching eyes, he pulled out a tiny metal ball. It was Shen’s holodrone, which the old Centrist had brought when they had fled the tents, and which he had given to Xie in exchange for asylum in the Floodzone.
Now, standing tall between the flames, the One-Eyed Captain activated the holodrone, which hovered up and began to glow. He looked back at the Jade dying on the Bund and remembered his family. Finally, he thought, as he climbed back down the hull and clambered into the speedboat, the world understood his pain.
On the barge, the holodrone made orange tongues of flame appear as iridescent robes, flaring up into a halo of green tendrils hundreds of feet in the air. Waves of heat took form into the head of Li Aizhu framed in a teal tiara, her black hair waving, one giant arm stretching from her floral gown towards the sun. And the traditional image of Chang’e flying into the clouds grew and grew until it overshadowed even the tallest superscrapers.
And all the marauding Jade, every cop and victim, even the mayor in his tower, watched as the colossus of a hologram cried out, “I am Chang’e, reborn to purify he world. Now, my children, the door to Heaven is open. Follow me, and your souls will be saved forever!”
And the specter screamed as it spread into the sky, wider and fainter until it disappeared, leaving only the rotten plastic stench of Puxi burning.
Chapter 55 – Feng (豐)
Thunder And Lightning
Li swam until her arms ached. When she reached the other side, she scrambled from the water onto the Pudong riverbank. Xie was already there, with the speedboat, pouring a vial of nanobots onto the hull. He stepped back as the nanobots spread, covering the pilot and the boat with a soupy hue. Then the entire boat rippled and disappeared as the nanobots changed the refractive index of their surface coatings, creating a thermoptic bubble that rendered the boat invisible. The engine revved, and only its wake jamming downriver could be seen in the setting sun.
Li ran at Xie and tackled him. Ignoring the roaring fires eating Puxi behind her, she put a knee on his chest. “What have you done?” she screamed, pinning him down on the ground.
Xie saw her in his split vision and smiled. He ignored her petty words, lost only in the bliss of knowledge, eager to see his wife again in paradise. “God would not let you kill me before,” he said, “and He won’t now, for I am the voice of truth. And I say that you and your demon daughter will suffer the same fate as every other sinner in this evil city.”
She balled her fist, and burned to punch it through his chest. But there was the Tiger’s Den, towering above, teasing her. She thought of her daughter, ashamed of her, and felt s
ick that she had been so willingly groomed into an angel of death. She lifted her fist to snuff out Xie’s life, but even as she did, she knew that if she murdered him it would mean that she was still just a pawn, an assassin doing the bidding of hidden men. And she realized that she could not bring herself to kill, not even a man who had unleashed so much destruction in her name. She spit in Xie’s face, but let him go.
The One-Eyed Captain laughed as he rose, cackling maniacally, and ran to a hydrocycle that had been planted the day before. Three other hydrocycles zoomed past them on the road beyond.
“I want you to know that we have the last of the longshui,” Xie said, wondering how he had ever seen holiness in her, “and the demolition ordinance we stole from Ma’anshan. Where you have failed your people, I will bring them beyond the Western Hills.”
He ignored Li as she begged him to stop. Instead, he sped after his men, carrying a longshui bomb into downtown Shanghai.
Xie heard mantiscraft hovering over the domes, and knew drones were tracking him, drawing the cops close. The closer the better, he thought. One of his men swerved across lanes of selfdrives, forcing traffic to swing wide as the cycle veered off the highway and into a nest of blue roofs. An explosion popped, and several blocks of lights blinked out. Xie saw one of the mantiscraft peel off, its spotlights sweeping over the black void, illuminating circles of buildings in the dark. And the One-Eyed Captain heard cymbals and drums, and felt holy light guiding his hand.
A second hydrocycle turned off the highway at a tributary. A spotlight caught it and a mantiscraft fired, cutting the bike in two. Its gas tank tripped, sending a thin comet of fire tumbling off the road and into a marina of river yachts. Something broke open and a sphere of electrons burst out, lighting up occuhives with thorny sparks and arcing up around the mantiscraft, catching the ship in an electrical storm. The craft’s lights blinked dead in the air before it crashed into an occuhive, tearing out four stories of glass before the tower collapsed in on itself.
